I don’t hate it! Though it doesn’t help us much to decipher the meaning of those passages. I suppose it’s then likely that
but it is CROSH MOOK
is “but it is still (something).”
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I’ll keep throwing out scattered observations in the hope that someone has an idea.
The COAS appears twice in the text. The second is the most clear:
The dwarf grabs the DIGROGI from the COAS.
The COAS wasn’t included in our inventory description, and notice that it’s “the COAS” and not “your COAS” or “its COAS.” This rules out e.g. “your hands” and also significantly decreases the chance that COAS is an (implicit) backpack or other container.
The other instance of COAS occurs in the passage involving the mysterious DUCK:
SMOOTH DUCK
A SHOIN of COAS NOOL PRESNEL around the SARR. The CARHIMI smoke hisses NEIDII as it is QUALEN NEROM.
The DUCK unleashes COAS here (not the DIGROGI), and the form of the passage suggests that the COAS is a fluid or gas, or some other material that can travel “around the room(?)” and can be apportioned into SHOIN.
EDIT: In fact, thinking it over, maybe COAS = “air”?
The dwarf grabs the DIGROGI from the air.
(after you toss it over to them); and a blast?/gust?/puff? of fresh? air could well blow around the SARR and interact with the smoke.
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Yeah, moving air definitely sounds like something the player character would try to get rid of the smoke!
So we’ve hit the point where all of the easy pickings are done and further progress is going to require some careful scrutiny of the text along with maybe a flash of insight or two. We can broadly group the different passages within the text into three categories:
- Fully translated or essentially so (the maze, most of the meta-text)
- Translated enough that we essentially understand what’s happening, even if there is some specific vocabulary to quibble over (the introduction, the ending text, most of our interactions with the dwarf)
- Still in need of a translation for at least one key term in order to interpret what’s taking place (the first location, the last part of opening the door, the ending of the dragon fight)
I think we’re going to have to work on that third category to make any significant amount of further progress. The two words which I’m most keen to decipher are SEAT and ALL. I’ll start with SEAT because it’s the one we have the firmest candidate for a translation of (“fire”).
In favour of SEAT = “fire”
- Closely related to SEAG, which we are pretty confident is “burn”
- A wall of fire seems like a classic adventure game obstacle
- The dragon casts a SEATI spell, and fire magic seems like the most obvious kind of magic for a dragon to use
- We can translate “RUBUC SEAT” as “catch fire” (thanks @evouga for this one), which is a phrase that is otherwise not obvious
Against SEAT = “fire”
- We already have SEAGO=“burning”, so what is “SEATO”? Why are these two different words?
- We have “your sword SPOIGH PONSE the SEAT”, and (since POSE=“on” and N often signifies negation), this sounds a lot like “your sword bounces off the SEAT”. But fire is not commonly known for its propensity to having things bounce off it.
Thoughts?
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I like it! Agreed with the ‘in favor’ and some thoughts on the ‘against’:
What if instead of ‘off’, PONSE meant ‘through’? ‘Your sword swings through the fire’ seems like a thing an adventurer might try in that situation. That would make ABOUT PAINT mean ‘attack PAINT’, which might be on the other side of the fire wall? And ‘attack’ is definitely a thing that a parser would respond “(with the sword)” to.
Not sure about SEAGO. My first thought was ‘typo’, but it does show up a few places. Then again, ‘fiery’ and ‘burning’ are different words in English…
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Also “burning” and “flaming” and so on. On the one hand, it does seem weird that someone designing a puzzle like this would include close synonyms (when the data is already so sparse); on the other hand, we do see both GET and TAKE; on the third hand, both GET and TAKE were from the originally-provided walkthrough, while SEAGO and SEATO aren’t.
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Well, on the fourth hand, the first argument in favor of SEAT=fire is 'it’s close to ‘SEAG’. So, if you’ve already distinguished the two root words, and you know players can work out the ‘-o’ suffix, also including both SEATO and SEAGO seems reasonable.
That would make SEATO=‘fiery’/‘of fire’, SEAGO=‘burning’/‘on fire’
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I think UNLOCK (which we try on the dwarf) is probably “attack” but ABOUT could be “cut”, which is also a plausible input for which the parser would clarify “(with the sword)”.
The PAINT is also made of SEAT:
The PAINT LEID of SEAT NATOR and CLAIZ, and then EIMAR to CARHIMI smoke.
It seems the DANCE spell reshapes or transforms the wall of SEAT into a PAINT of SEAT.
I agree that I would be much more comfortable with SEAT = “fire” if SPONSE were “through.” I also agree with @jwalrus 's logic though that the natural antonym of “on” is “off.”
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Funny enough, I think that TRIM (which we do to the dragon) is the “attack”!
I’d put UNLOCK = “disarm” (and ABOUT = “cut”).
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If POSE is on, PONSE could be “extinguish”, but it’s unlikely that a sword extinguishes fire, unless it SPOIGH meant “does not”
I’ve never seen “disarm” used as a verb in a parser game, so I figured UNLOCK was “attack” and TRIM was some sort of attack synonym like “stab”. We do end up disarming the dwarf, but I wasn’t sure if that was inadvertent.
I’m not sure what COURNE could mean (“you COURNE a TRIV DEXINI” when we attempt to UNLOCK the dwarf), but it’s the same verb used for what the bars on the door do, which should be something like “retract”. Maybe “slide”?
I think it might be something in the direction of “unleash/release,” I just can’t quite find a single word that works for (e.g.) both “you unleash a great blow” and “the bars release, uncovering the button.”
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I might have missed this on the vocab list, but the reference page still has NER JANAI untranslated.
It looks like it should be “No problem”, which suits N as a general negation
There was a suggestion that it could be “not difficult” because JANAI looks like an adjective.
Since I don’t have loads of free time to update the translated transcript, I haven’t been rushing to do anything about cases like this one where (1) the exact words are not known, (2) the meaning is broadly obvious and (3) nothing else depends on the translation of those words.
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I’ve updated the translation. I put “flame” instead of “fire” for SEAT because it appears in the plural in once instance and also because “wall of flame” sounds cooler than “wall of fire”.
Since no-one seemed to be pushing back on the idea that GARST=“pit”, I’ve put that in too, and then TORSH=“cave” and TORSHO=“cavern”. This has led me to wonder about the meaning of DOBLEN/DORBLEN. I’m not sure if these are two separate words or if one is a typo for the other. The dwarf’s dropped axe goes CALMINJO across the DOBLEN which makes me think that it’s either “floor” or “room”. The dragon is introduced as being “in the GRAEM of the DOBLEN” which sounds more consistent with “room”. However, in the western part of the cavern, we have “the DORBLEN is SHIAR here, covered with ZATHAL HAMEBO”. This could be “ground” (e.g. “the ground is rougher here”) which, if DORBLEN is intended to be the same word as DOBLEN, would work with the sentence about the dwarf but not the one about the dragon. Alternatively, if they really are different words, DOBLEN could be “floor” and DORBLEN could be either “ground” (synonym) or “ceiling” (antonym), but “floor” still doesn’t sound particularly good in the sentence about the dragon.
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The NAM QUAL at your BUNALY. Your sword JEVOL to VOLS in your hands. The axe head CRELN from its handle. The nasty knife shatters into metal shards.
We have here three synonyms of “break.”
- The two words JEVOL and VOLS are obviously related. Notice that it’s VOLS, not VOLY, which rules out the otherwise tempting “splinters to splinters.”
There aren’t too many singular nouns meaning “lots of unusable pieces.”
The sword disintegrates to dust in your hands.
maybe? I would be happier with two words that have a closer tie in form.
-
Then we have the infamous CRELN. “Break” fits if we need it for the gemstone description later, though I still don’t love our current best guess, “break your toe on.”
-
I don’t hate VORHEL = “shatters.” VOR being “half” (or some other fraction) makes me lean towards VORHEL = “split” or something like that, if we need “shatter” for one of the other verbs. VORHEL may also be related to “the deadly ORHELN” the dragon dodges.
As for the first sentence, I like “The earth shakes at your feet,” though I don’t love smoke being “shaken NEROM.”
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I feel like there must be more “classic IF” references that we must be missing. I’m not super familiar with classic parser works (recognizing the dwarf from Adventure was a fluke). Have we fully exhausted iconic Zork items/scenes? I know we’ve drawn the connection to the “moby ruby,” and mentioned the “large emerald” as a possibility, but I feel like there’s nothing major on the level of the dwarf yet, and maybe there should be?
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Good catch! This would mean that, linguistically, it has to be an ergative verb. These are verbs that can be used either with two nouns (subject and object) or only one (subject), and the subject of the one-noun form corresponds to the object of the two-noun form. For example, “I drank the tea” is equivalent to “I drank” (not ergative), but “I boiled the water” is equivalent to “the water boiled”, not to *“I boiled” (ergative).
There aren’t a ton of these, so I’ll see if anyone’s compiled a list somewhere. I like evouga’s suggestion of SWING.
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I feel everyone is pretty close on this one, so I’ll say that at least part of this bit is, indeed, the reference that was accidentally more obscure than it was intended to be.